Description

You are a mutant human, who by some freak of nature has the ability to shoot energy pulses from his body in eight different directions! Your job is simple: save humanity from their own creation -- the ROBOTRONS! The gameplay is pretty unique for the time. You can move and fire in any of eight directions. You get thrown in a room with various evil baddies strewn about, you've got to kill all the robots while at the same time finding some way to grab humans and avoid death.

Trivia

1001 Video Games

Control scheme

The original arcade version of Robotron: 2084 was played with two joysticks, one to move and one to fire. The Atari 5200 version of the game also uses this same control scheme; to make operating two 5200 joysticks easier, a special "controller holder" was bundled with the game. Robotron: 2084 is one of two Atari 5200 games to utilize this, the other being Space Dungeon.

Launch title

Robotron: 2084 was one of the "Fabulous Eleven" launch games for the Atari 7800.

PC quality conversion

This is one of the better Atarisoft conversions; everything is very faithful to the original, single joystick control is very good, and there is practically no slowdown on a 4.77MHz machine. This is notable because the Atarisoft conversions of the early 1980s varied wildly in quality, from faithful to extremely poor.

TI-99/4a port

Atarisoft planned to sell a cartridge conversion for the Texas Instruments machine, but the release was cancelled. The game is nevertheless in circulation in prototype and image form.